Saturday, September 10, 2011

Another dress for Sofie

I am a very lazy blogger. And a lazy sewer! But not to worry. I have recently made another formal dress for Sofie. We used the following dress from Net-A-Porter as inspiration:

Notte by Marchesa. Looking closely at the dress on Net-A-Porter it appears the dress is a white strapless dress with a thick black ribbon tied around and joined to the dress in strategic places.

That is how we approached making the dress. We started with a muslin for a Burda mag sheath dress (can't recall what number and it doesn't really matter as we changed it) and shaped the top to be sleeveless. We shortened it too!

Muslin looked good so we proceeded. I used a silk remnant I purchased in Hong Kong on one of my early trips. The black duponi was from Spotlight. We also used up a black crystal zipper purchased way back in Hong Kong too. I am sure they did not cost more than $10 all up. The black silk cost as much!

We won't discuss here all the trouble I had with that zipper! we won't mention that I shortened it and more than once managed to get the tab off of it. I thought we were a goner! Sofie to the rescue with her young eyes. By the third time she wasn't so happy with me however....

As this dress would no doubt be like others and worn only once, I took some shortcuts. I didn't do any boning. We put on a strap and I hoped that would hold up the dress well enough. Sofie's breasts had other ideas. If she leaned forward all was showing and even standing up her left breast was escaping. What to do!? Here is our quick fix - see the black patch on her left side above the white? We found a scrap and just sewed it in! Works well to cover her up and tighten the dress a bit. Not so pretty from the inside.

The right side was just a matter of arranging the "ribbon" into a pleasing shape and hand stitching in place. This was harder than I thought it would be. The proportions were hard to get right as I had made the black "ribbon" smaller as Sofie is much smaller than the model but I didn't take into account that her bust however is much larger than the model.

And the troublesome zipper -

We stitched the zip exposed on the outside. The dress is also lined.

Overall it is not my best effort but I think she looked gorgeous and the dress lasted out the night. It is still at the drycleaners as she managed to get a drink splilled on it and plenty of body makeup too. And did you see those killer shoes I bought her?

It's a beautiful dress and an astonishingly good reproduction of the original. I too love sewing for my daughter and hope to make a body form of her so that I can sew while she's away at university. I hope her taste will improve to the sophisticated level of your daughter.